What is art? , well a person may ask that out of curiosity to which a one word can be ‘expression’. Art is a form of expression where the artist through his pieces, wants to showcase his mindset or his way of thinking or looking at a particular thing. Our eyes help us to see the world but if two people are shown the same picture, it’s not necessary that both will focus on the same thing. In the very same way, art as a form of expression focuses on different aspects. Art is influenced by society’s culture but art also influences society’s view, it is in fact a symbiotic relation between the two.
Contemporary art has been greatly influenced by the rapid development in digital technology and by the astonishing progression in the introduction of new, more attractive and tougher materials that artists can work with. Both these innovations have expanded horizons of creativity and opened new artistic frontiers. They have also allowed contemporary artists to reduce time spent in the actual execution of artwork to a minimum thereby freeing them to focus more on contemplation, creativity and developing groundbreaking ideas, as well as sound preparation for artwork.
Technology in the form of graphic design, computer-generated paintings, photoshop, digitally created music, e-books, 3D printing – are just to name but a few! They have undoubtedly affected art across various mediums. Technology has opened a floodgate of imagination and has also helped to bring the imagination into reality. Not limiting its affect to just enlarging the horizon of creativity, technology has also created a global platform for artists across the globe and brought them to the limelight.
In the past, painting and drawing depended on the artist’s skills in using his traditional tools – the brush, the pencil, charcoal or pastels. The artist, through conventional and calculated steps, control of the density of color, the degrees of the different shades, the realism or abstraction of his work of art. But with the advent of technology and new tools for use, artists can find new ways and methods of producing new art forms.
If we take the example of photography and its comparison between then and now, then we can see that this art form has come a long way in the past few years. Johann Zahn designed the first camera in 1685. But the first photograph was clicked by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in the year 1814 and since then, in the time span of a little more than 200 years, photography as an art form has achieved new heights.
Even in the field of sound and music, technology has brought a revolution. The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. After the advent of digital sound recording and later the CD in 1982 brought significant improvements in the durability of consumer recordings. Today there are many different digital audio recording and processing programs running under several computer operating systems for all purposes. Today with advancement of technology, any sound or music can be created or recreated by sitting indoors with the softwares.
Needless to say, technology has changed how art is produced and shared. Whilst the huge arsenal of tweaking and fine-tuning options open up unlimited possibilities for artists to express themselves more creatively and accurately, still some can argue that it has somewhat dampened the flame of creativity as artists are absorbed in the enormous technological capabilities and maybe in a way snatched away the uniqueness of a work, in some cases making the work more unrealistic in the name of creativity
-Mobani Biswas
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August 20, 2019 |
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